Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Search eText, Read Online, Study, Discuss. Lhereux Just finished chapter 6 in part 3. Lheureux, the draper and money lender, presents Madame Bovary a massive bill. Maybe I will find out soon, but I wonder why he lent her all that money when he knows she cannot pay him back. I suppose he expects her husband will be forced to pay, but then Lheruex threatens her with showing him a receipt for something she sold behind his back. There was a time in England when a husband was legally responsible for any debts his wife ran up, but I don't know if it was the same in France in the mid C19th. If Charles Bovary is legally responsible for his wife's debts, then why didn't Lheureux send the court order to him? Posted By kev67 at Tue 26 Jul 2016, 11:31 PM in Madame Bovary || 7 Replies Madame Bovary I was reading an article about this book recently and found this.

"It has been pointed out by some critics that Flaubert's book shows an exaggerated cynicism and an unwarranted degree of hatred for the bourgeoisie."........."Should she not have met with at least one or two people who understood her?" Do you agree with this criticism? Posted By chevalierdelame at Wed 7 May 2014, 4:20 AM in Madame Bovary || 9 Replies I think every forum of every major work from every author needs one of these threads... I think the title speaks for itself; any reviews on any translation is appreciated. Posted By MorpheusSandman at Tue 10 Nov 2009, 11:56 PM in Madame Bovary || 4 Replies Madame Bovary, The Disillusioned Love The novel Madame Bovary was an amazing novel no getting around that but one idea that presented itself that somewhat troubled me was, the vague notion of true love being inaccessible. Through out the entire story we see Emma's constant longing for that pristine conception of love but her hopes always seem to completely back fire.

Now I will admit that Emma Bovary was no beacon of morality and that her view on life wasn't the greatest but that doesn't imply that the message about love isn't there. In my opinion in the whole novel every character worked in there own self interest and could care less about any other person. Some would probably argue that Charles Bovary was a good person but if you examine his character you can notice that he never has a will of his own throughout the whole book he is only doing what people tell him to do, ultimately not knowing anything about himself or never having a real personality. The realization for me was that the book implies there is no such thing as true love between people because the only thing that someone loves is themselves. It is a rough concept to agree with but it does make some sense, even if it is really subtle love is very selfish. You might love someone and not think twice about it, but deep inside you enjoy the fact that the person you love loves you back, treats you well, provides you with comforts or is simply spends time with you. Regardless of what it is the reason most people love is because you are getting something out of it.

Which is what Gustave Flaubert demonstrates to us with each character looking to fulfill one of their needs when it comes to how they love. However the dilemma of this concept is that is there such thing as true love? Posted By Babak Movahed at Wed 1 Jul 2009, 6:35 AM in Madame Bovary || 6 Replies Madame Bovary and Jane Austen I am doing the IB program, and I'm currently working on my English Extended Essay. My supervisor suggest that I do something on Madame Bovary.... I'm thinking maybe even Madame Bovary/Jane Austen(Pride and Prejudice?)? (because I absolutely love Austen) I haven't read Madame Bovary yet though so I was wondering if anyone could give me a few suggestions as to how the two novels connect?? Or even just ideas about what to focus on when I read the novel? I was thinking about looking at dance in both novels... but I'm told there is only one scene in Madame Bovary... however, I have also been told that it's very significant?? so would just one scene suffice?

Posted By flicka at Mon 15 Jun 2009, 5:49 AM in Madame Bovary || 0 Replies Madame Bovary took me by surprise! Wow, it took a little while to get started, but now about 60 pgs into it, the book is starting to shine. At first it seemed as though Flaubert was making up for a mediocre story with great use of language, but now I'm starting to see this is like one giant poem, with the words chosen just as carefully. Its more exciting reading the sentence structure and seeing how creative he can get than the story itself for the most part, but now I see he is not using the story as a mere excuse to show his amazing writing ability, but as a medium that works well with his writing style. Anybody else share my feelings or see it in a different light? I know some people couldn't stand Madame Bovary. I'm glad I waited until 22 years of age before undertaking it, as perhaps its my limited reading experience in the classics is why I must have a dictionary nearby as I read :lol:.

Posted By eBagger at Mon 5 Jan 2009, 3:46 AM in Madame Bovary || 7 Replies looking for the right word... Man I'm really raking my brain on this one, this lack of sleep is killing me :sick:. Anyway I'm writing a paper on Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and I'm looking for the right way to describe Emma Bovary. Specifically, I'm looking for a literary allusion. Madame Bovary is a character who has an insatiable desire for the romantic, which, without trying to spoil the novel for anyone, ruins her. I'm looking for another famous character in literature I can allude to, who's want for something destroys them. To be even more specific I'm trying to fill this blank "... finds only passing emotions and no true, sustainable happiness in a _______ dream world." It's still an early rough draft and by the end I'll probably change it completely, but for now trying to explain Emma in that sentence is really bugging me. Any help?

Posted By Nick Rubashov at Mon 19 Feb 2007, 3:31 AM in Madame Bovary || 10 Replies Madame Bovary I was recently given the list of novels we could choose to write our senior research paper on in my English Literature class. Of the four choices, I went with Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Everyone else was going with 1984, but since I've already read Orwell's novel, I wanted to do something different. Besides, that's some serious competition if everyone is choosing the same book. I'd rather pick something different that will hopefully be a breath of fresh air for my teacher. I think it's pretty funny that on the list of books to write about in the final, biggest, most important paper we'll ever receive in my English Literature class, the teacher listed a book written by a Frenchman. I hope it was a smart decision to go with Madame Bovary, and I was just wondering if anybody here on litnet has read the book before, and what do you think of it? I'm looking forward to pick it up tomorrow and start reading.

Posted By Nick Rubashov at Fri 5 Jan 2007, 5:27 AM in Madame Bovary || 10 Replies It seems a little odd that one of the most influential novels in history is nowhere represented here, or that the posters on this forum don't seem to like it. Funny how present tastes are so dominant. Posted By smoothbore42 at Sun 22 Aug 2004, 4:23 PM in Madame Bovary || 5 Replies SparkNotes: Madame Bovary: Context Madame Bovary Table of Contents Plot Overview Gustave Flaubert once remarked, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”). On the surface, this comment seems ridiculous; the circumstances of Flaubert’s life have nothing in common with those he created for his most famous character. Flaubert was born in 1821 in Rouen, France. Emma Bovary’s father is an uneducated farmer, whereas Flaubert’s father was a respected and wealthy doctor. In addition, Emma dreams of becoming sophisticated and cosmopolitan, while Flaubert moved in the highest literary circles in Paris.

Finally, Emma endures an unhappy marriage and seeks out lovers. On the contrary, the reclusive Flaubert spent most of his time living in solitude. Since their biographies are so strikingly dissimilar, Flaubert’s comment probably meant that he and his character shared many of the same struggles and desires. Emma Bovary becomes obsessed with an idealized vision of romantic love. Similarly, Flaubert became fixated at a young age upon an older woman named Elisa Schlessinger, with whom he fantasized about having a romantic relationship for many years. Emma suffers from ill health and a nervous condition; Flaubert also suffered from poor health and may have had epilepsy. Though he was an esteemed writer, Flaubert was afflicted with an abiding pessimism that caused him to sink into frequent depressions, just as Emma does when she realizes she never can have what she most desires. Flaubert, too, could never attain what he most wanted. He remained lonely and bitter throughout his life as a writer. Though admired by his French contemporaries, Flaubert was deeply hurt by the moral outrage Madame Bovary provoked at its publication in 1857.

The novel depicted extramarital sex in what were, for the time, graphic terms, and Flaubert and his publisher were put on trial for violation of public morals. They were acquitted, but the experience intensified Flaubert’s hatred of middle-class morality. The hatred of middle-class values is strongly apparent in Madame Bovary. In Flaubert’s lifetime, France was caught in the throes of immense social upheaval. The Revolution of 1789 and the imperial reign of Napoleon were recent memories, and the collapse of the aristocracy was paralleled by the rise of a new middle class—or bourgeoisie—made up of merchants and capitalists with commercial, rather than inherited, fortunes. As a member of the educated elite, Flaubert found the moral conservatism, rough manners, and unsophisticated taste of this new class appalling. He attacked the merchant class in novels such as Madame Bovary, the story of a woman imprisoned by her middle-class surroundings, and in another novel, Sentimental Education. In addition to criticizing the middle class, Flaubert’s novel also reacted against romanticism.

Romantic writers, who were popular in France between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, wrote emotional, subjective novels that stressed feeling at the expense of facts and reason. When Flaubert began writing, a new school called realism had started challenging romantic idealism with books that focused on the harsh realities of life. This school included other French writers such as Stendhal and Honorè Balzac, as well as English writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Flaubert recognized a strong streak of romanticism in himself. In Madame Bovary, romanticism is present, but Flaubert always treats it with irony. Flaubert allows himself a few romantic moments but recognizes their flaws. Though it was his first novel, Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s most accomplished and admired work. In many ways, the novel provides the blueprint for the genre of the modern novel. For example, Flau-bert was a pioneering stylist, matching the style of his prose to the action of his story in a remarkable new way. Where other realist novels of the mid-nineteenth century used detached, objective narration, Flaubert’s prose conveys the mood of his characters.

When Emma is bored and restless, the prose plods dully; when she experiences sensual pleasure, it moves rapturously and swiftly. We frequently see this technique of communicating mood through language in novels today. More Help Madame Bovary (1949) - IMDb IMDb 29 December 2016 2:33 AM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A provincial doctor's wife's romantic illusions about life and social status lead her to betray her naive husband, take on lovers and run up ruinous debts.

Director: a list of 40 titles created 18 Feb 2011 a list of 30 titles created 09 May 2012 a list of 31 titles created 07 Feb 2013 a list of 33 titles created 14 May 2013 a list of 24 titles created 17 May 2014 Search for " Madame Bovary " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 1 nomination. See more awards » Photos Madame Bovary is a 1937 German historical drama film directed by Gerhard Lamprecht and starring Pola Negri, Aribert Wäscher and Ferdinand Marian. It is an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel Madame Bovary. Director: Gerhard Lamprecht In nineteenth-century France, the romantic daughter of a country squire (Emma Rouault) marries a dull country doctor (Charles Bovary). To escape boredom, she throws herself into love ...

See full summary » Director: Claude Chabrol A sensitive woman who fell down on account of convencionalism. Her dull life will convey her to a tragic fate. Director: Carlos Schlieper Madame Bovary (TV Mini-Series 1975) Drama Madame Bovary (TV Movie 2000) Drama | Romance A young woman in her late teens, a reader of novels and with high hopes of romance and passion, marries a widowed country doctor. Although he dotes on her, she is soon bored and discontent.... See full summary » Director: Tim Fywell Allen Quinton writes a fellow soldier's love letters; tragedy results. Later, Allen meets a beautiful amnesiac who fears postmen... Director: William Dieterle Tom Lee is a sensitive boy of 17 whose lack of interest in the "manly" pursuits of sports, mountain climbing and girls labels him "sister-boy" at the college he is attending. Head master ... See full summary » Director: Vincente Minnelli A girl is engaged to the local richman, but meanwhile she has dreams about the legendary pirate Macoco. A traveling singer falls in love with her and to impress her he poses as the pirate.

Director: Vincente Minnelli A vain businessman puts strains on his happy marriage to a rich, beautiful socialite by allowing himself be be seduced by a former girlfriend. Director: Mervyn LeRoy After spending three years in an asylum, a washed-up actor views a minor assignment from his old director in Rome as a chance for personal and professional redemption. Director: Vincente Minnelli In the post-war, the alcoholic and bitter veteran military and former writer Dave Hirsch returns from Chicago to his hometown Parkman, Indiana. He is followed by Ginnie Moorehead, a vulgar ... See full summary » Director: Vincente Minnelli Soon after the death of his first wife (whose dowry was inadequate), Charles Bovary, a country doctor in Normandy, marries Emma Rouault, who is well-endowed in every sense. In her new home,... See full summary » Director: Jean Renoir Edit Storyline French author Gustave Flaubert is on trial for writing the "indecent" novel "Madame Bovary." To prove that he wrote a moral tale, Flaubert narrates the story of beautiful Emma Bovary, an adulteress who destroyed the lives of everyone she came in contact with.

Written by Daniel Bubbeo <dbubbeo@cmp.com> All she wanted was everything. See more » Genres: 23 January 1950 (Sweden) See more » Also Known As: Madame Bovary und ihre Liebhaber See more » Filming Locations: Mono (Western Electric Sound System) Color: Did You Know? Trivia Director Vincente Minnelli wanted Lana Turner for the role of Emma, but Turner found the script dull and flat, refusing to accept the role; she was also pregnant at the time, another reason for her turning it down. Jennifer Jones was cast instead. See more » Quotes – See all my reviews Three versions stand out as far as Flaubert's classic is concerned:the Jean Renoir one,with Valentine Tessier,which has not worn well,the acting has become unconvincing and almost lurid when you see it today,Minelli's version and Claude Chabrol's starring Isabelle Huppert ,which doesn't avoid totally academism,despite Jean-François Balmer's portrayal of Charles that steals the show .

Now for Minelli 's attempt:some have been hard on his rendition,and however,it features the best Emma ever:Jennifer Jones,the romantic heroine par excellence.Her savage beauty,looking tense,triumphs here. The supporting acts are well-chosen:Van Heflin is oafish,meek.The French Louis Jourdan is well-cast as Rodolphe Boulanger,Emma's lover who betrays her and leaves her to despair.Their final confrontation,in Boulanger's luxury mansion oozes hatred and contempt.

The main drawback is the rural background:Minelli did not realize how this country life disgusted Emma:the wedding,a very very peasant one ,which Flaubert describes in lavish detail,is too short on the screen.The farms are too clean-Emma dreamed her childhood away because she could not stand the mediocrity of her milieu.She jumped out of the frying pan into the fire:a two-bit doctor,a would-be sawbones who 's totally incompetent.Van Heflin's rendering makes up for Minelli's weaknesses.The movie is sandwiched between two brief scenes of Flaubert 's trial (He was accused of immorality in his book),that's redundant.It would have been better to tell the audience about Emma's daughter's terrible fate:after the doctor's death,an orphan,she becomes a worker in a spinning mill.Supreme decay for a mother who was longing to be a socialite. 28 of 36 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes Julian Barnes reviews ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis · LRB 18 November 2010 by Gustave Flaubert , translated by Lydia Davis Penguin, 342 pp, £20.00, November 2010, ISBN 978 1 84614 104 1 If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years old. What would/ should/do you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’.

You want it to read as if it had originally been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a French reader (though you would also want some sense of distance, and the pleasure of exploring a different world). But what sort of French reader? One from the late 1850s, or the early 2010s? Would you want the novel to have its original effect, or an effect coloured by the later history of French fiction, including the consequences of this very novel’s existence? Ideally, you would want to understand every period reference – for instance, to Trafalgar pudding, Ignorantine friars or Mathieu Laensberg – without needing to flick downwards or onwards to footnotes. Finally, if you want the book in ‘English’, what sort of English do you choose?

Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French.

They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk. As it happens, this dream was once a reality. The first known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856-57. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher of Madame Bovary, that ‘an English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes.

If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five years later, he was to call Juliet Herbert’s work ‘a masterpiece’. But by this time it – and she – were beginning to disappear from literary history. Though Flaubert had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her resurrection by Hermia Oliver in Flaubert and an English Governess (1980). [*] If Juliet’s ‘masterpiece’ were ever to resurface, we should hope it comes attached to the lost Flaubert-Herbert correspondence, and to a photograph of Juliet, of whom no known image has survived. The translation of Candide has also been lost. As for Flaubert and Shakespeare: it’s not clear if he ever achieved fluency in English – with or without Juliet – but his library contained the works of ‘le grand William’ in both English and French.

So the British reader had to wait another three decades – until 1886, six years after the author’s death – for the first published translation of Madame Bovary. It too was made by a woman, Eleanor Marx Aveling (Marx’s daughter – a quiet irony, given Flaubert’s caustic views on the Commune), as is the very latest, by the American short-story writer – and Proust translator – Lydia Davis. In between, most of the 15 or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle a question as it seems. That perfect translator must be a writer able to subsume him or herself into the greater writer’s text and identity.

Writer-translators with their own style and worldview might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from two or three lines to two or three pages, are decidedly unFlaubertian in scope and extent; they vary from the wry episode and rapt reverie to the slightly cute aperçu; and if there is French influence around it is from a later date (thus Davis’s ‘The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists’ seems to owe a debt to Jarry). [†] Her own life is clearly the basis for some of the stories, whereas Flaubert’s aesthetic was famously based on self-exclusion. On the other hand, Davis’s work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control.

And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’. That her translation of Madame Bovary was deemed worthy of serialisation by Playboy magazine – which puffed it as ‘the most scandalous novel of all time’ on the cover – is a noisier irony of which Flaubert might well have approved. The publicity sheet for the US edition calls Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. At least none of those 15 translators has needed to recast its title; problems start, rather, with the subtitle, ‘Moeurs de province’.

You can have ‘Provincial Manners’ (Marx Aveling), ‘Life in a Country Town’ (Hopkins, 1948), ‘A Story of Provincial Life’ (Alan Russell, 1950), ‘Provincial Lives’ (Geoffrey Wall, 1992), or ‘Provincial Ways’ (Lydia Davis). No one, as far as I can see, has adopted the cousinly subtitle of Middlemarch, ‘A Study of Provincial Life’. Several translators simply delete it – even, surprisingly, Steegmuller (1957); though this could have been the publisher’s initial dereliction, since more recent editions contain his nicely emphatic ‘Patterns of Provincial Life’. Subtitles can seem fussy and old-fashioned (thus the cover of the current Penguin Middlemarch dispenses with Eliot’s five subsidiary words), but omission seems a little perverse. Many translators (or publishers) also omit the next words in the novel – the dedication to Maître Sénard, who got Flaubert off the charge of outraging morality and religion when the novel, still in serial form, was prosecuted.

Davis, an impressive completist, includes both this and the other, and more important, dedicatory page of the first edition, to Flaubert’s partner-in-literature Louis Bouilhet. Though – to enter the world of micro-pedantry – she (or her publisher) prints the two dedications in reverse order to the original French edition. But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss. It’s no surprise that Davis took nearly three years to translate Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as it had taken Alas to write. ‘Translation is a strange business,’ Rutherford noted in his introduction, ‘which sensible people no doubt avoid.’ Take a simple sentence from the first pages of Flaubert’s novel.

In his early years, Charles Bovary is allowed by his parents to run wild. He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph: ‘Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs.’ The meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If you want to try putting this into English yourself first, look away now. Here are six attempts from the last 125 years to translate yet not traduce: 1) Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of colour. 2) And so he grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of hands and a fresh colour. 3) He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good colour. 4) He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy. 5) And so he grew up like an oak.

He had strong hands, a good colour. 6) And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good colour. All contain the same information, but only the words ‘he’, ‘like’ and ‘strong’ are consistent to all six. Some of the matters these translators would have considered (on a scale from pertinent reflection to gut feel) would include: Whether to lay the paragraph out as two sentences or one; if the latter, then whether the break should be marked by a comma or a semicolon. Whether, indeed, to lay it out as a separate paragraph anyway: thus 1) chooses to run it on at the end of the previous paragraph, which makes its summarising effect less pointed. Whether poussa implies more vigour than the English ‘grew’: hence 4)’s ‘throve’ and 5)’s addition of the intensifying ‘up’. Whether acquit is best rendered by a neutral word like ‘had’ or ‘was’; or whether it is a verb indicating a kind of action, intended to parallel poussa.

Hence ‘acquired’ or ‘grew’ – though if you have ‘grew’ here, you need a different verb in the first sentence: hence ‘throve’. Whether you need to – or can – keep the balance of ‘de fortes mains, de belles couleurs’. Only 1) does this by putting them both in the singular; the rest introduce an imbalance of number. What to do about belles couleurs. All five translators agree that there is no way of preserving the plural form. But a) do you need to unpack this a little, and indicate that the young lad is acquiring a ‘fresh’ or ‘ruddy’ colour, or indeed ‘complexion’ (which decides that couleurs is limited to the face – though reference has already been made, on the novel’s first page, to his ‘red wrists’); or b) is it self-evident where the lad is, and what is happening to his skin, so a non-specific ‘good’ echoes a non-specific belles? All these six versions – given in chronological order – have their virtues; none is obviously superior.

1) is Marx Aveling, a version which, as Davis notes in her introduction, caused Nabokov ‘much indignation in his marginal notations but to which he resorted in teaching the novel’; 2) is Russell; 3) Hopkins; 4) which, even on this short evidence, looks freer than the others, is Steegmuller; 5) is Wall; and 6) Davis. Wall and Davis are the two who stick closest to the original sentence structure and are least ‘interpretative’. There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes, such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation. Its general development over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins!

– which seeks to echo the original language. We no longer use the verb ‘to English’ – it sounds proprietorial, even imperialist – but when Flaubert was first being translated it was still current: thus the first London and New York edition of Salammbô – published in 1886, the same year as Marx Aveling’s Madame Bovary – is described on its title page as having been ‘Englished’ by (wait for it) ‘M. French Sheldon’. This progress away from ‘Englishing’ can be seen in the six versions of Charles’s growing (up) quoted above. Similarly, in Chekhov translation, Constance Garnett has been succeeded by Ronald Hingley. Succeeded, and yet not supplanted: some of us continue to read the Garnett translations. Mainly because they do the time-travelling work instantly, and give a better illusion of being a reader back then, rather than a reader now inspecting a text from long ago through precision optical instruments. It may be, however, that something different, or additional, is going on: a kind of imprinting.

The first translation we read of a classic novel, like the first recording we hear of a piece of classical music, ‘is’ and remains that novel, that symphony. Subsequent interpreters may have a better grasp of the language, or play the piece on period instruments, but that initial version always takes some shifting. The authentic rendering of every last nuance of meaning cannot be the sole purpose of translation. Because if it becomes so, it leads to the act of eccentric defiance that is Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin. In his 1955 poem ‘On Translating Eugene Onegin’, Nabokov, addressing Pushkin, writes of turning ‘Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,/Into my honest roadside prose –/All thorn, but cousin to your rose.’ When Nabokov’s version of the poem came out in 1964, it was prose laid out in stanza form, and more woody stalk than thorn. Readers of the poem in English are best advised to have the two volumes of Nabokov’s headmasterly commentary to hand while apprehending the poem’s dance and flow through, say, Charles Johnston’s version.

An even weirder example of fidelity leading to perversity is Dillwyn Knox’s 1929 translation of Herodas for the Loeb Classical Library. Knox’s brilliant niece Penelope Fitzgerald describes the outcome in The Knox Brothers with a sympathetic glee: The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study . . . Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas. ‘La no reke hath she of what I say, but standeth goggling at me more agape than a crab’ is a typical sentence, while ‘Why can’t you tell me what they cost?’ comes out as ‘Why mumblest ne freetongued descryest the price?’ Satisfied, Dilly corrected his proofs; he read the reviews, all of which praised the accuracy of the text but considered the translation a complete failure, with indifference.

‘If I am unintelligible,’ he wrote, ‘it is because Herodas was.’ Davis, in her introduction, notes that Gerard (not, as she has it, ‘Gerald’) Hopkins’s version has ‘added material in almost every sentence’; while Steegmuller produced a ‘nicely written, engaging version, smoother than Flaubert’s, with regular restructuring of the sentences and judicious omissions and additions’. Does this sound a trifle patronising to America’s greatest Flaubertian? Here is a typical addition (or rather, substitution) which will act as a good test of what a reader requires. When Léon goes to meet Emma inside Rouen cathedral, he first has to get past a verger standing in the left-hand doorway beneath a statue that Flaubert refers to as ‘Marianne dansant’. This was the popular nickname for a carving of Salome dancing on her hands before Herod. What do you do about this? Almost all translators render it as ‘Marianne Dancing’ or ‘The Dancing Marianne’. If you leave these words unannotated, readers will naturally imagine some cheery folkloric image.

If you annotate them, then you divert the reader away for a guidebook moment – as elbow-tugging as the intrusive verger will prove to be to Léon and Emma. (You can half-solve it, as Davis does, by having notes at the back but without indication in the text of their existence; so readers may find the solution, but perhaps not at the right time.) Or, as Steegmuller alone does, in his unannotated version, you can cut to the chase and write: ‘The verger was just then standing in the left doorway, under the figure of the dancing Salome.’ This is instantly comprehensible, and has the additional virtue of pointing up this image of lasciviousness beneath which Léon passes on his way to the tryst.

(Inside the cathedral, this theme is continued: when the verger reaches the tomb of the Comte de Brézé, he solemnly points out Diane de Poitiers as a grieving widow, while the rest of us know her as a king’s mistress – and also, as Emma is soon to be, the lover of a younger man.) Given that there is probably no one in Rouen who still refers to the statue as ‘Marianne dansant’, there is much to be said for Steegmuller’s solution. But some would find it overly interventionist. The root feature of Davis’s translation is a close attention to Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure, and an attempt to mirror it in English. For instance, observance of the ‘comma splice’ – where two main clauses are connected by a comma rather than an ‘and’ – or of subtle tense changes imperceptible to others (and sometimes imperceptible in English). In the earlier example (‘Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs’), she writes the boy had ‘good colour’ where Wall has the boy had ‘a good colour’: dropping the article retains the original plain adjective-noun balance.

In her introduction, Davis castigates some of her predecessors for wanting ‘simply to tell this engrossing story in their own preferred manner’. Interviewed by the Times, she expanded on this: ‘I’ve found that the ones that are written with some flair and some life to them are not all that close to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of clunky.’ This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be ‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful, because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is French prose whose every syllable has been tested aloud again and again. Flaubert said that a line of prose should be as rhythmical, sonorous and unchangeable as a line of poetry. He said that he aimed only at beauty, and wrote Madame Bovary because he hated realism (an exasperated, self-deluding claim, but still). He said that prose was like hair: it shines with combing. He combed all the time.

As for those imprecise translators who nevertheless bring ‘flair’ and ‘life’ to the novel: where does that flair and life come from, if not the novel itself? Davis concludes: ‘So what I’m trying to do is what I think hasn’t been done, which is to create a well-written translation that’s also very close, very faithful to the French.’ This is a high claim; though I doubt any of those previous translators would have thought they were trying to do anything very different. Davis’s quest to be ‘very close, very faithful’ to the French works best when the Flaubertian sentence is plain and declaratory. Take that great moment of delinquent self-awareness: ‘Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.’ Davis’s ‘Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage’ exactly reproduces the French, and has exactly the same effect. You might think hers is the obvious translation until you compare other versions. Both Steegmuller and Hopkins diminish the line by recasting it, and even Wall, who is closest to Davis, misses out the necessary, intensifying ‘all’.

On the other hand, a page or two later there is this equally key sentence: ‘Tout et elle-même lui étaient insupportables.’ This is an unusual sentence. A usual sentence might be ‘Tout lui était insupportable; elle-même comprise’ or ‘y compris elle-même’. Flaubert specifically links the ‘Tout et elle-même’ and it is a mistake to decouple them, as Davis does, into ‘Everything seemed unbearable to her, even herself’ (which adds the clunk of a repeated ‘her’). Wall also goes awry here: ‘It was quite unbearable, beginning with herself.’ Hopkins unpacks it perhaps too much: ‘She hated everything and everyone, including herself.’ Steegmuller is best, with: ‘She loathed everything, including herself.’ But even this doesn’t convey the full effect of that simple et – which is to indicate a separation of self from world which will culminate in the deed which finally does separate Emma’s self from the world. So Davis’s division of previous translators into flair-bringers and clunkheads doesn’t really hold; nor does her claim to offer the best of both worlds. Two further examples.

After Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe, there is a paragraph describing her post-coital, semi-pantheistic experience of the forest surrounding her, with which she is for the moment in harmony. But with the last sentence, Flaubert cuts this mood brutally: ‘Rodolphe, le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassée.’ This great anti-romantic moment has Rodolphe turning both to another physical pleasure (as Gurov will with his watermelon in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’), and to masculine, practical matters. All the versions cited here begin, unsurprisingly, with ‘Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth . . .’ Wall goes on: was mending one of the two broken reins with his little knife. Steegmuller: Contact us for rights and issues inquiries. Letters Vol. 32 No. 24 · 16 December 2010 It is a pity that Julian Barnes in his piece on the new Penguin edition of Madame Bovary doesn’t mention the excellent translation by Margaret Mauldon ( LRB, 18 November ).

One of its many virtues is that it corrects the misprint all the translations he does mention fail to notice. The first edition of Madame Bovary, published by Lévy, was copied out before publication by a certain Dubois. Anyone who has seen the brouillons in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen knows how hard a job he had. All the same, the first edition, whatever inaccuracies it may have contained, didn’t have the misprint in Part 2, Chapter 14 that crept into later editions and has been preserved in most translations. Emma is at the height of her nervous crisis after the end of the affair with Rodolphe. She calls for communion. She feels something overcoming her. Then comes the misprint. Marx Aveling renders it: ‘Her body, relieved, no longer thought.’ Steegmuller goes for: ‘Her flesh had been relieved of its burdens, even the burden of thought.’ Russell and Wall get it wrong too. In French the misprint reads: ‘Sa chair allégée ne pensait plus.’ A simple error given Flaubert’s atrocious handwriting.

It should read: ‘Sa chair allégée ne pesait plus.’ ‘Her lightened flesh no longer had any weight.’ This was pointed out to me as a student in 1979. Lydia Davis, like Mauldon, is one of the few who get it right. Alan Dent Madame Bovary - Modernism Lab Essays Madame Bovary by Pericles Lewis Gustave Flaubert 's Madame Bovary (1856) is the story of a bored housewife who has two extra-marital affairs but finds adultery almost as disappointing as marriage. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. In January, 1857, the French prosecutor Ernest Pinard accused Flaubert of an “offense to public and religious morality and to good morals” for publishing the novel.

Pinard failed to win a conviction, but the court reprimanded Flaubert for forgetting that art “must be chaste and pure not only in its form but in its expression.” [1] Flaubert attempted to cure the banality of modern “received ideas” through the dispassionate and precise use of language. He wrote that “the artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” [2] This idea of the godlike artist did not involve meting out punishments or pronouncing moral judgments. Rather, his narrators were generally unobtrusive. His use of what literary critics call “free indirect discourse” (in French, “style indirect libre,” “free indirect style”) tended if anything to undermine the idea of the objective narrator, by making it difficult to distinguish between the perspective of the narrator and that of the character. The method transformed realism and even became an issue in the trial. In direct discourse, the narrator quotes a character: “Madame Bovary said, ‘I have a lover!

a lover!’” In indirect discourse, the narrator paraphrases a character’s statement or thought: “Madame Bovary said that she had a lover.” In free indirect discourse, however, the narrator paraphrases the thoughts of a character, sometimes at great length, without marking them off with a phrase like “Madame Bovary thought that…” In a well-known example, Emma Bovary looks forward to life as an adulteress while regarding herself in a mirror: She repeated, 'I have a lover! a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. The last two quoted sentences appear in free indirect discourse. Flaubert seems to be summarizing Madame Bovary’s thoughts, in her own language, but he does not explicitly state that these are her thoughts, rather than his own opinions as author or narrator. Indeed, the prosecutor Pinard quoted these two sentences at Flaubert’s trial as if to suggest that they represented the view of adultery promoted by the novel.

[3] Although free indirect discourse belongs to the traditional methods of the novel, and was used extensively by Jane Austen, Flaubert’s use of the technique took full advantage of its potential to create irony and ambiguity and thus prefigured such modern experiments as the stream of consciousness. What was remarkable about Flaubert’s use of the style was that virtually every value judgment in the novel, indeed every descriptive statement, seemed to be made from the point of view of one of his characters. The impersonality of the author, for Flaubert, meant showing Emma Bovary’s reality as it appeared to her and the other characters in the novel, rather than telling the reader what view of her situation was correct. The prosecutor Pinard even seems to have touched on the nature of free indirect discourse when he asked, “Who can condemn this woman in the book? Nobody. Such is the conclusion. There is not in the book a character who can condemn her…. Would you condemn her in the name of the author’s conscience? I do not know what the author’s conscience thinks.” Flaubert’s refusal to render an explicit moral judgment on Emma Bovary challenged the prevailing conception of an author’s duty.

Pinard complained that “Art without rules is no longer art; it is like a woman who takes off all her clothes.” [4] Flaubert’s manipulation of the rules of art to create moral ambiguity and irony seems to have offended Pinard and the court more than the simple fact that he wrote a novel about an adulteress. This aspect of Flaubert’s achievement appealed strongly to the modernists, who were to make ambiguity and irony central to their literary work. [5] ↑ Dominick LaCapra, "Two Trials," in Denis Hollier et al., eds. A New History of French Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 726. ↑ Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, December 9, 1852. ↑ On Flaubert's use of free indirect discourse and its contribution to his realism, see LaCapra, "'Madame Bovary' on Trial" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982); Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in Jauss, Towards an Aesthetics of Reception, trans.

Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), pp. 3-46; and Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1953), pp. 482-492. ↑ LaCapra, "'Madame Bovary' on Trial," 39-40. ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 37, 42-43. Madame Bovary Study Guide | GradeSaver Madame Bovary Study Guide Buy Study Guide Madame Bovary , written by Gustave Flaubert , was published in 1857 in French. Flaubert wrote the novel in Croisset, France, between 1851 and 1857 and set the action in the same period of time, the mid-1800s, in the French towns of Tostes, Yonville, and Rouen.

Flaubert's protagonist is Emma Bovary , a young, beautiful girl who wishes deeply for romantic love, wealth, and social status, which are out of her reach due to her marriage to Charles Bovary , a middle-class doctor. Emma's dissatisfaction leads to extra-marital affairs, extreme selfishness, and illnesses following ended romances. The climax occurs when Emma's creditor, Lheureux, obtains a court order to seize her property because she has not paid her debts. Emma cannot find financial help anywhere, so she eats a handful of arsenic to escape the situation she has created. After Emma's death, Charles becomes very poor, discovers Emma's infidelities, and dies. Their daughter Berthe , now orphaned, is sent to work in a cotton mill. Flaubert took five years to complete Madame Bovary. A perfectionist, Flaubert often worked seven hours a day for days at a time to perfect a single page of text. In truth, Flaubert despised the bourgeois, and on urging from his close friend Louis Bouilhet, chose to compose a novel inspired by bourgeois life. Bouilhet reminded Flaubert of the Delamare family in particular.

Eugene Delamare had been a fairly poor medical student studying under Flaubert's father, a well respected doctor. Unable to pass his exams, Eugene became an officer de sante and worked in a country town near Rouen. Like Charles Bovary, Eugene married an older widow who died within a few years and then married a young, pretty daughter of a nearby farmer. Madame Delamare was educated in a convent and had a penchant for romantic novels. At first excited to escape her family farm, Madame Delamare soon grew bored and frustrated with her husband and her life. Like Emma Bovary, Madame Delamare was extravagant with money and had many extra-marital affairs. She soon developed great debt and then committed suicide by poisoning herself. Eugene had been deeply in love with the selfish woman and, unable to live without her, committed suicide himself. Eugene's mother raised the couple's only daughter in poverty. Direct experiences of the author also were reworked into the novel. For instance, in creating Emma Bovary, the novel's protagonist, Flaubert was inspired by his mistress Louise Colet, who gave him the insight to consider Emma's discontented childhood.

Moreover, Doctor Lariviere was based on Flaubert's father, and the maid Felicite was based on Flaubert's nurse, Julie. Flaubert also used medical terminology with the help of his brother Achille and his friend Bouilhet. Initially the novel was considered highly controversial due to its depiction of adulterous affairs, and it was the subject of a trial in 1857. Flaubert delves into the sexual relations between Emma and her lovers and, more importantly, appears to glorify adultery and disgrace marriage. Since it was considered inappropriate for the public, precautions were taken to prohibit access to the book.

Question: Who wrote the novel "Madame Bovary"?
Answer: Gustave Flaubert